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For Monster.com, the initial benefits of virtualization
in the data center were easy to see: With 500 virtual machines
(VMs) running on 17 servers, Monster cut power and hardware
spending and improved efficiency, since virtual machines can be
deployed much faster than standard hardware. But as
Monster’s virtual environment got big, and got big fast,
management problems arose. The worst one: The company
didn’t have enough visibility into which applications
were competing with each other across storage and server
resources—and this was affecting IT’s ability to
meet service-level goals, says Pete King, manager of monitoring
and analysis at Monster.

“We ran into a lot of contention,” says
King.

So King turned to BalancePoint, a workload balancing and
applications service-level-management tool from startup Akorri,
to ease the pain. BalancePoint shows when and why a particular
VM is not performing up to standard, and based on that data,
King can redistribute the load to increase efficiency. It
analyzes performance on the VMware side and storage area
network side to avoid virtual fights for resources.

Now that Monster has been using BalancePoint for a little
more than a year, “there’s less trial and
error,” says Paul Neilson, senior vice president of
technology services. Monster no longer has to move VMs around
based on “intuition,” he adds.

Almost everyone using server virtualization will bump up
against one or more of the common management problems,
including workload balancing, “VM sprawl” and
disaster recovery plan complications, says IDC analyst Stephen
Elliot. Tools from VMware and a growing number of third-party
vendors can help.

Keep Your Balance

Workload balancing can be a tough problem to get your arms
around. One key benefit of virtual machines is the ability to
move them easily from one physical server to another. Problem
is, it’s hard to know how many VMs on a particular server
are too many—since the answer may depend on the
applications, plus factors like memory and attached storage. In
an environment where critical applications compete for the same
server, it becomes difficult to see which applications are
contending with each other, and this affects a company’s
ability to prevent slowdowns.

For Monster, managing this challenge required multiple
tools, a situation that’s not uncommon. Monster uses
Akorri’s BalancePoint to augment the capabilities of
VMware’s two main management products, VMotion (which
increases hardware utilization by migrating VMs on failing or
underperforming servers to another machine) and Distributed
Resource Scheduler (which couples with VMotion to allocate
resources to high-priority VMs based on preestablished rules
you set).

A key point: DRS and VMotion show where to balance workload,
but they aren’t analytical and don’t see contention
with other apps outside of VMware, King says. Since
BalancePoint isn’t tied to the OS, it can see if VMware
performance is impacted by other apps residing on the same SAN
resources, he says. “DRS just sees what it sees for
performance through the host (CPU, memory and storage), but it
can’t see what the database server that’s on the
same side as the SAN is doing,” says King.

The more VMs you move into production, the more critical
predictability becomes, says Rick Knode, director of computing
and communications infrastructure for San Diego Data Processing
Corp. (SDDPC), a nonprofit provider of government IT solutions
that serves customers like state agencies. Knode needed help
managing resources in the company’s current environment
(50 VMs on three servers) and in the future: Approximately 100
additional VMs will be added to production in the next fiscal
year, Knode says. He looked to Vizioncore’s esxCharter
tool to obtain performance information on SDDPC’s VMware
ESX servers in real-time. This tool looks at performance levels
and processes running inside the virtual machine. Being able to
adjust the CPU power and memory allocated to VMs is critical
when you need to make on-the-fly adjustments and terminate or
move processes that are adversely affecting environments, Knode
says. “It gives you more visibility into what’s
going on.” For example, if a specific VM is eating away
at one of his processors and affecting other VMs on that
processor, he can use DRS and VMotion to move the VM onto
another processor. But he says he wouldn’t know which VMs
to move without Vizioncore.

At Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the United States,
Tony Bishop, chief architect, turned to Scalent for help
balancing workloads for his 1,000 VMs running on a few hundred
servers used in development, testing and back-office roles.
Scalent, which may be used independently or in concert with
VMware, helps Bishop repurpose servers quickly. “Some of
the other [management] tools we looked at also have forms of
provisioning, but they don’t have the ability to act in
as near real-time as possible, like Scalent can,” says
Bishop. Scalent’s software gives him management
flexibility when apps are competing for resources, he says.

Scalent’s Virtual Operating Environment
(V/OE) tools, which may be used with or without
VMware, maintain network and storage connections
while moving servers. Scalent also redeploys
servers in case of failure or load change.

Flexibility also pays with regard to disaster recovery, an
area where CIOs are increasingly looking to virtualization.
Nate Stuyvesant, CTO of Genilogix, an IT consultancy, says
disaster recovery is his company’s biggest IT management
issue, period. He’s not alone.

According to Gartner data, 70 percent to 75 percent of
Gartner’s clients who are using virtualization for x86
servers are also using it for disaster recovery. Genilogix runs
60 VMs on four servers across development, testing and
production environments. Stuyvesant relies on VMotion to move a
server over to another physical box and effectively eliminate
downtime, VMware’s DRS tool alone is a cogent reason to
consider virtualization in the first place, he says.

Eric Miller, president and CEO of Genesis Multimedia, a Web
hosting company that also designs its customers’ Web
applications, uses VMotion to increase uptime and improve
reliability in his environment of 55 virtual machines running
on three hosts, where some customers need higher utilization
than others. Miller relies on VMotion, driven by DRS, to move
the virtual machines around.

Genesis is no stranger to virtualization—it has been
operating in a virtual server environment since VMware made its
debut—but management isn’t always easy. The initial
move to consolidate 12 servers used for Web hosting, and two
larger servers for database systems, helped Genesis manage its
physical servers, but moving virtual machines around,
implementing patches and performing BIOS upgrades without
experiencing downtime was difficult, Miller says. As an
infrastructure provider, Genesis must provide high service
levels, so uptime is critical. “We couldn’t
maintain those without VMotion and DRS,” says Miller.

Add-on tools can help address the problem of “VM
sprawl,” by keeping track of how many VMs you have and
where.

“It’s somewhat ironic that the benefit of
virtualization is resource optimization, but it encourages
messy behavior,” says Cameron Haight, a research vice
president at Gartner, noting that almost all his clients cite
VM sprawl as a big worry. “You can spend these things so
quickly that you lose track of what you have,” Haight
says.

SDDPC’s Knode says Vizioncore helps him prevent VM
sprawl in the first place. “By watching the metrics of
the virtual environment, we plan ahead. So by using VMware and
Vizioncore I can see how many additional resources are
available on an ESX host, and when is a good point to move
machines or purchase additional servers or storage. We’re
using the product as a preventative measure.”

Virtualization 3.0

Monster’s King and Wachovia’s Bishop both say
they’d like virtualization management vendors to take the
next step—better integration of their tools with existing
management software. For example, King would like to see the
tools in HP’s Mercury Business Availability Center suite
(which Monster uses for transaction and infrastructure
monitoring) integrated with BalancePoint.

Bishop agrees: “We’ve achieved very good
results, but we’re trying to create an integrated
management capability with all the tools in one view.”
Bishop, who uses HP’s Mercury BAC suite, OpTier CoreFirst
and Symantec i3, would like to see these tools better
integrated with Scalent, VMware and DataSynapse, which he uses
for application virtualization. After all, he says,
virtualization tools can solve manageability issues, but CIOs
want a holistic management picture.